Norways stance on forbidding (or make it impossible?) their citicens to download music from the i-tunes stores is certainly not fair to the consumer as well. After all they should be able to decide by themselves wether they want to be locked into using the i-tunes/iPod combination or not.
But one has to add here that the big companies like Apple and Microsoft tend to just ignore any other means of legal repression (fines...., time ultimates...), or at least did so in the past.
As mentioned above, Apple has absolutely no legal right to "Music" or the "mp3-format", but still they force the use of their products upon it through their monopolised stores.
If the idea behind it was to cause a financial loss for Apple, and therefore force them to rethink their business-ethics, then that might not work, since Norway by itself is problably just too small to hurt their business. But if more countries would follow......
I haven't seen the complete legislation behind it, but I would hope that Norway introduced this new law on the premises that it would be nullified as soon Apple stops its DRM-locking on the music they resell. If so, the whole action would be more of an "enforced strike".
Still, its certainly a risk to do so. At the end, the Norwegian Parlament will have to pay its price at the next election if it didn't work out as intended, or if the outrage over this law is too big.
